Jeffrey Sachs, the eminent development economist at Columbia University, takes FORBES to task ( click here for more). Why don't journalists spend as much time inquiring into the lives of the billion poorest people on Earth as they do gawking at the fortunes of the thousand richest? Now, we have published many articles about ways to help destitute nations (go to forbes.com/poverty for a link to them). But professor Sachs has a point: We devote more ink to wealth than to poverty.

So what is the cure for Africa's ills? You can pick up three recent books on the subject, from an idealist, a realist and a theorist. They present radically different interpretations of chronic poverty.

The idealist is Sachs, whose 2005 The End of Poverty prescribes more aid. Why has all the foreign aid of the past half century failed to make a dent? Not because of kleptocrats or lack of free markets, he says, but simply because we have been too stingy. Take U.S. foreign aid to sub-Saharan Africa in 2002, counting only projects that could build a future for the poor (infrastructure and education, for example), and you get all of 6 cents per capita.

William Easterly, a New York University professor, is the realist. In The White Man's Burden, published last year, he condemns the centralized planning and utopian visions of aid organizations like the World Bank. His figure on foreign aid is quite different: $2.3 trillion spent so far by the West, with no visible benefit. Solution: entrepreneurial philanthropists solving small problems one at a time.

For a novel and somewhat dispiriting theory of economic divergence, read A Farewell to Alms, published this year, by Gregory Clark of the University of California at Davis. He doesn't accept the view, common among the utopians, that natural endowments like soil and water explain why rich nations are 50 times as prosperous as poor ones. How can differences in natural resources possibly explain Zimbabwe's misery or Singapore's wealth? Clark amasses an extraordinary collection of historical data to explain why the Industrial Revolution was born in western Europe, not Africa or India. Over a period of six centuries, he says, the bourgeois virtues of thrift and industry were built into English culture--even, by dint of the higher reproductive success of wealthier families, into English DNA. His cure for failed nations: more emigration.

You can look at a village in Madagascar, and then at the heaps of riches displayed in the pages of this magazine, and be appalled. But you can also be hopeful. More than a few of these billionaires are entrepreneurial philanthropists.